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I’ve been working away on my characters for my preschool/early years project. It’s developing nicely and I’ve made a lot of changes including getting rid of some characters that I wasn’t happy with. There are also a few new faces!

Head over tomystrawberrymonkey.comto see the rest of this exciting project. If you have kids/grandkids there are some free games and activities for them to enjoy!

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Ohhh My! It's been an incredible journey so far and it's only getting better. I'm super excited to announce that the 3rd book is finally here and available on Amazon.

Learn to count with Strawberry Monkey and his friends. Your own cheeky little monkeys will love the bright and colourful pictures as we learn to count, discover colours & understand shapes. So, if you have any cheeky little monkeys go grab you copy below! @MattP@Chris B

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Ohhh My! Looks like Monsieur Tiger is taking Daddy Monkey on a Daddy day trip around France! I've always loved the idea of combining Illustrations and photography.

Besides creating this for bit of fun, it got me thinking about how I hadn't thought about culture and diversity when starting out on this journey. That's something I'm going to change as My Strawberry Monkey develops and continues to grow.

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So, I've decided to share where My Strawberry Monkey all started over the next few posts. Hopefully it will inspire and encourage you to keep going at what you're doing. Looking back at these images, clearly I was blind and didn't have a clue at what I was doing, still feel the same way, well, just a little bit.

My Strawberry Monkey originally was the name for my freelance company back in 2014 ish, I was working on some motion graphics and video editing at the time. Before that I was called Saffire14 Media but I really wasn't happy with the name and was inspired to change by a company I came across called Fox & Velvet, my name just felt so boring in comparison. When I did change (I will share how I came up with the name in a future post) I needed a logo. I was just learning how to use Photoshop at the time and had no skills besides video editing & motion graphics. So I used my best friend, Google and found the image attached, I worked out how to apply a couple of filters to make him look pink and the second image was the result.

This was before Affinity came into my life and yes downloading an image and using as my logo wasn't the best or right thing to do, I just really wanted to get going with an Idea and I never intended to keep this logo and as I said, I really didn't know what I was doing in Photoshop, it was so daunting and complicated to use.

Let me be clear, at this point in my life I had no intention to make a children's picture book and preschool website or even a clue of what to do.

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I think it was early 2015 that I discovered Affinity Designer and I started to play around with some ideas for my Twitter Header, I was trying to sell some wall prints on ETSY at the time and I also used the same font and logo for both platforms.

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Here's one of my first ideas for the full Strawberry Monkey character and what he looks like today! I think one of the biggest challenges I face with this is, learning how to illustrate and use Affinity Designer at the same time, remember, I come from a video editing background, illustration is new to me. I used a body from a business card mock up after recreating the head for my logo of my freelance company. Still learning at this point and the thought of a book still hadn't entered my head.

When I did get a bit more comfortable with the app, my original idea was to create these witty one-liners feat Strawberry Monkey, aimed at adults, with a goal of producing a comic strip weekly over on Instagram. Whilst I had used Facebook and Twitter the world of Instagram was new to me and I still had to work out the platform.

The second image you see is, I think it's the first (nope, just checked, it was the 2nd) of the comic strips, I did make a post on here and remember a comment from @eejits, wishing me luck but from experience he also made me aware of how challenging it was keeping it up on a weekly basis. Yep, you were right @eejits!

I think I posted about 9 images between April and September 2016, so much for my "weekly comic strip"

It was around this point, October, November 2016ish I thought I would have a better reach aiming this at the preschool/early years world.

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I created the first book around the last image I posted, the 'normal' process of creating a book would be writing away using word etc, then spend time trying to find the right illustrator!

I started my process by creating an image and turning that into a book.

What's the setting?

How did he get burnt?

Does he learn?

Why is Betty there? (the Giraffe)

From questions like this I was able to create more images, then I started to tell a story. Here's images from the first idea I had for the book cover, then what it turned into and what it looks like today!

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Do your own cheeky little monkeys get this excited when Daddy comes home? Loving the the direction My Strawberry Monkey is moving in, not a path I expected when I started, but it's very exciting! Stay tuned for some more revelations and exclusive insights and something that I'm very excited about!

Not sure how my tiny little brain comes up with all these ideas, I love getting inspired by my surroundings and creating images, and then analysing them:

What do you see?

What’s the setting?

Are they young or old?

Animals or human?

What are they doing?

From questions like these, I then create more images, then I start to tell the story based on the images, as they say a picture paints a thousand words. It’s definitely an alternative approach, however, this is what works for me!

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We're super excited about this! Check out this interview we did with Affinity about our journey with our children's picture books and preschool website over on Affinity spotlight, hopefully it will provide you with some inspiration!

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This has been a great read. It’s great to see the beginnings of it all and the progression. You’ll definitely growing a big oak tree from this wee acorn o’ an idea. Have always loved My Strawberry Monkey (even though my pre-school kids are now all nearly grown up). Seeing all the reviews and feedback you get from your work is brilliant too.

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This has been a great read. It’s great to see the beginnings of it all and the progression. You’ll definitely growing a big oak tree from this wee acorn o’ an idea. Have always loved My Strawberry Monkey (even though my pre-school kids are now all nearly grown up). Seeing all the reviews and feedback you get from your work is brilliant too.

.....and I hate to say I told you so but,

George

Thanks George! I'm starting to put myself out there more and telling the story behind My Strawberry Monkey, it helps to have this written down as I'm sure I'll create content from this.